Electronic signature specialists DocuSign took last week’s ESIGN summit in San Francisco as a major opportunity to show off what they’ve been working on since last we spoke — and heading that list is integration with the SaaS Salesforce.com Chatter social networking platform. DocuSign says it’s just the first step in getting their electronic signature solutions into the hands of businesses everywhere. Here’s the scoop.

The Chatter platform, for those not in the know, is a social networking platform that automatically feeds data from any Salesforce.com application to subscribers. Where DocuSign’s Chatter integration demo comes in is keeping organizations in the loop with the sales process, automatically and up-to-the-minute, to the point where you know customers are looking at your contract.

DocuSign VP and Chief Strategy Officer Tom Gonser says that the real value is that no one needs to remember to log in and change a status manually for all concerned parties to get the update. When the contract is signed, you know it instantly, speeding up the process and granting deeper visibility into the sales cycle, Gonser says.

The ESIGN summit was co-hosted by DocuSign, Salesforce.com, and cloud content management company Box.net – and as part of the event, Gonser says DocuSign discussed recent integration deals with both other companies. As an OEM partner with Salesforce.com, their electronic signature platform will be offered to all CRM customers as a “best practice,” and Box.net now enables secure content collaboration and contract closing in the cloud.

Gonser indicates that DocuSign has a lot more on its plate: voice identity authentication; iPad demoes (Gonser notes that since the iPad is about the size of a piece of paper, it’s a natural fit for an upcoming DocuSign app); more and better integration with other SaaS platforms.

We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on DocuSign going forward – they’re a big fish in a growing pond, and I think their early confidence in the Chatter platform will pay off in the long run.

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